IVF Journey: Egg retrieval plus three

This is my IVF diary. My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for three and a half years now, and have a diagnosis of 'unexplained infertility'. We have finally reached the top of the waiting list for IVF - a form of assisted conception. I'm blogging about what happens as it happens, as a kind of therapy for me and as an awareness raising exercise of what IVF is all about.

So when the eggs have been collected and fertilised they are placed back into the womb on either day 2, 3 or 5. I'm on day 3 today, and I was told that the IVF clinic would call me this morning and let me know if I needed to come in today or if it would be on day 5.

The clinic didn't tell me much about this, but I did some searching on the web and found out a bit more. Basically, the longer they can keep them out of me the better. This is because they want to pick the best one, and every day the rank order is changing and some are dropping out. So the longer they wait, the more sure they are that they have picked a really strong candidate. If they can hang on until day 5 the embryo is called a blastocyst, and it is much more certain that it will continue to develop. This is a bit 'survival of the fittest' in that you probably lose some before day 5, but the lost ones probably wouldn't have made it if they'd been put in anyway. In older women or women with fewer eggs or few good quality embryos they put them in early, because they might as well. It is also relevant that on day 3 of a natural conception the embryo would be floating about in the womb, waiting to implant on day 5. So putting an IVF embryo back in on day 5 mimics the natural process more closely. All of this leads to an increased chance of success for a day 5 transfer - something in the region of 66% chance of a live birth (according to the internet).

You can imagine, we were hoping for day 5. So I was nervous last night and this morning, and also worried that all of our embryos might have died over the last day.

The nurse called me, as promised, at 10am. And it was good news. Excellent news. They grade all of the embryos, and 7 of ours are pronounced 'good quality' and still in the running. There is no clear candidate to pick. So we will wait until Monday. The nurse said that in her experience we'd probably still have about five on Monday, so we may be able to freeze some. She was very positive.

In some ways it would be good to get the embryo transfer done today rather than keep waiting to find out if it can happen. It feels like a gamble to wait, although it is the best thing to do. However, logically, doing a transfer on day 5 and having some day 5 blastocysts to freeze is absolutely our ideal outcome, so fingers crossed for that.